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Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By John Hawkins, Head, Canberra School of Government, University of Canberra

Central bankers from around the world have issued a joint statement of support for US Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, as he faces a criminal probe on top of mounting pressure from US President Donald Trump to resign early.

It is very unusual for the world’s central bank governors to issue such a statement. But these are very unusual times.

The reason so many senior central bankers – from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom and other countries, as well as the central banks’ club the Bank for International Settlements – have spoken up is simple. US interest rate decisions have an impact around the world. They don’t want a dangerous precedent set.

Over the course of my career as an economist, much of it at the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Bank for International Settlements, I have seen independent central banks become the global norm in recent decades.

Allowing central banks to set interest rates to achieve inflation targets has avoided a repeat of the sustained high inflation which broke out in the 1970s.

Returning the setting of monetary policy to a politician, especially one as unpredictable as Trump, is an unwelcome prospect.

What’s happened

Trump has repeatedly attacked the US Federal Reserve (known as the Fed) over many years. He has expressed his desire to remove Powell before his term as chair runs out in May. But legislation says the president can only fire the Fed chair “for cause”, not on a whim. This is generally taken to mean some illegal act.

The Supreme Court is currently hearing a case about whether the president has the power to remove another Fed board member, Lisa Cook.

And this week, Powell revealed he had been served with a subpoena by the US Department of Justice, threatening a criminal indictment relating to his testimony to the Senate banking committee about the US$2.5 billion renovations to the Fed’s historic office buildings.

Trump has denied any involvement in the investigation.

But Powell released a strong statement in defence of himself. He said the reference to the building works was a “pretext” and that the real issue was:

whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions – or whether monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.

On Tuesday, more than a dozen of the world’s leading central bankers put out a statement of support:

We stand in full solidarity with the Federal Reserve System and its Chair Jerome H Powell. The independence of central banks is a cornerstone of price, financial and economic stability in the interest of the citizens that we serve. It is therefore critical to preserve that independence, with full respect for the rule of law and democratic accountability.

Another statement of support came from leading US economists – including all the living past chairs of the Fed. This included the legendary central bank “maestro” Alan Greenspan, appointed by Ronald Reagan and reappointed by George HW Bush, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

This statement warned undermining the independence of the Fed could have “highly negative consequences” for inflation and the functioning of the economy.

Why it matters for global inflation

Trump has said he wants the Fed to lower interest rates dramatically, from the current target range of 3.5–3.75% down to 1%. Most economists think this would lead to a large increase in inflation.

At 2.8% in the US, inflation is already above the Fed’s 2% target. The Fed’s interest rate would normally only drop to 1% during a serious recession.

A clear example of the dangers of politicised central banks was when the Fed lowered interest rates before the 1972 presidential election. Many commentators attribute this to pressure from then president Richard Nixon to improve his chances of re-election. This easing of monetary policy contributed to the high inflation of the mid-1970s.

A more recent example comes from Turkey. In the early 2020s, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan leaned on the country’s central bank to cut interest rates. The result was very high inflation, eventually followed by very high interest rates to try to get inflation back under control.

Trump should be careful what he wishes for

What will happen if Trump is able to appoint a compliant Fed chair, and other board members, and if they actually lower the short-term interest rates they control to 1%? Expected inflation and then actual inflation would rise.

This would lead to higher long-term interest rates.

If Trump gets his way, US voters may face a greater affordability problem in the run-up to the mid-term elections in November. This could then be followed by a recession, as interest rates need to rise markedly to get inflation back down.

And as over a dozen global central bank leaders have just warned us, what happens in the US matters worldwide.

John Hawkins was formerly a senior economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Bank for International Settlements.

– ref. Why the world’s central bankers had to speak up against Trump’s attacks on the Fed – https://theconversation.com/why-the-worlds-central-bankers-had-to-speak-up-against-trumps-attacks-on-the-fed-273450

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Dara Conduit, ARC DECRA Fellow, The University of Melbourne

As citizens around the world prepared to welcome the new year, Iranians began taking to the streets to protest their country’s deepening economic crisis. Spurred by the continued devaluation of the Iranian currency against the US dollar, as well as crippling inflation, the unrest is the latest in years of economic pain and protest.

The Iranian regime initially acknowledged the legitimacy of the protesters’ concerns, distributing hopelessly inadequate cash vouchers worth only US$7 to help with the cost of living.

But it’s since taken a much heavier hand. According to the regime’s own figures, as of today, at least 2,000 people have been killed. Protesters bravely continue to take to the streets.

Like clockwork last Thursday, the regime rolled out one of its most potent tools of population control: internet shutdowns. In the six days since, Iranians have been almost entirely cut off from the internet, with alternative means of access, such as smuggled Starlink terminals, proving unreliable because of satellite jamming.

As the world waits to see if US President Donald Trump follows through on his threats of “very strong action” if Iran hangs protesters, the truth is that even without international action, the regime can’t afford to keep Iran’s internet offline indefinitely.

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Read more:
The use of military force in Iran could backfire for Washington

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Why the regime blocks the internet

The Iranian regime has used internet shutdowns since the Green Movement protests following the disputed 2009 presidential election. They’re a powerful tool that stops citizens from communicating with the outside world and each another.

This limits opposition organising, because people can’t join protests if they don’t know where they are. It also isolates individuals, preventing them from seeing violent crackdowns outside their neighbourhood. Internet shutdowns also obscure the international gaze, allowing the regime to crack down on protesters in the dark.

Shutdowns have become so synonymous with political unrest that the non-government digital rights organisation Article 19 declared in 2020 “protests beget Internet shutdowns in Iran”.

Internet shutdowns are costly

But it would be a mistake to think the Iranian regime has an endless capacity to shut down the internet. Each shutdown comes at a high economic and political cost.

As well as blocking instant messengers and social media sites, internet shutdowns in Iran have often blocked work applications such as Slack, Skype, Google Meet and Jira. These are central to ordinary businesses’ operations.

Similarly, the regime’s efforts to block virtual private networks (VPNs) and secure HTTPS connections can wreak havoc on corporate payment systems, multi-factor authentication and even corporate email.

Global internet monitor Netblocks estimates internet shutdowns cost the Iranian economy more than US$37 million a day. That’s more than US$224 million in the past six days alone.

As I wrote in a recent journal article, we’ve already seen how bad the economic impacts of internet shutdowns can be in Iran.

During the 2022-23 protests following the death-in-custody of the Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa “Jina” Amini, internet shutdowns had far-reaching implications.

One source claimed the volume of online payments inside Iran halved in the first two weeks of the protests alone.

Iran has a vibrant e-commerce sector. An estimated 83% of its online businesses use social media platforms such as Instagram, WhatsApp and Telegram to generate sales. All three were blocked during the 2022-23 unrest. A report later found Instagram blocking and periodic internet disruptions in the 17 months after the protests cost the Iranian economy US$1.6 billion.

The regime has been working hard for decades to build a domestic internet that could alleviate some of this damage, but so far it has failed.

The regime’s enormous technology needs – for surveillance, but also to power a modern economy for around 92 million people – has led to the emergence of a large semi-private information and communications (ICT) sector in Iran. This includes internet service providers, cell network operators and a large IT sector.

Just six weeks into the 2022 protests, the cellphone operator RighTel’s chief executive penned an open letter to the ICT minister, Issa Zarepour, complaining the digital crackdown was crippling his business. He noted RighTel had upheld the regime’s “security priorities and requirements” during the shutdowns, and demanded compensation or RighTel may be forced to withdraw from the market.

These demands were echoed in letters privately written (but later leaked) by other communications providers.

These were not natural regime critics. Indeed, internet shutdowns were creating a dangerous dynamic in which even those close to the regime were being alienated, generating a new class of potential protesters who could one day join those marching in the streets.

Why the current shutdown can’t last forever

This is why the current internet shutdown is a risky strategy. While the regime is succeeding in concealing the worst of its bloody crackdown, it risks further provoking the country’s already struggling economic class.

In 2022-23, the shutdowns were implemented in a targeted manner, taking place for the most part in certain cities, or at specific times of day when protests were expected. In contrast, the current shutdown is countrywide.

Only 1% of internet connections in Iran are online today (which is how the supreme leader is still able to freely use X to spout propaganda). This means the economic and political impacts of this current shutdown, if it continues, could easily dwarf those of 2022-23.

Given Iran’s economic woes are the driving force of the current unrest, a sustained internet blackout could motivate more people to take to the streets. The regime is only too aware of this risk.

Dara Conduit receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Why Iran can’t afford to shut down the internet forever – even if the world doesn’t act – https://theconversation.com/why-iran-cant-afford-to-shut-down-the-internet-forever-even-if-the-world-doesnt-act-273454

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Jane Kelsey, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

The United States has now withdrawn from 66 international organisations, conventions and treaties, illegally invaded Venezuela, and promoted an “America First” agenda in its new National Security Strategy.

This all signals the collapse of a global system that has operated for the past 60 years. The old world order – driven by hyper-globalisation and US hegemonic power – is in its death throes, but a new era is yet to be born.

We now face a deepening ideological, strategic and military conflict over what shape it will take. The global “free trade” regime, overseen by the World Trade Organization (WTO), is one such battleground.

Largely designed to serve its strategic and corporate interests, the US now sees the WTO as a liability because of the economic ascendancy of China and a domestic populist backlash against globalisation and free trade.

But US antipathy to the current multilateral trade regime is not exclusive to the Trump administration. America has long resisted binding itself to the trade rules it demands other countries obey.

Congress reserved the power to review US membership when it authorised joining the WTO in 1994. Since then, both Republican and Democrat administrations have undermined its operation by:

• calling for an end to the Doha Round of negotiations launched in 2001

• breaking the WTO dispute mechanism by defying rulings that go against it, and refusing to appoint judges to the WTO Appellate Body so it is now moribund (effectively allowing rules to be breached)

• and starving the WTO’s budget during the latest US review of international organisation memberships.

To date, Trump has not withdrawn the US from the WTO. But his administration seeks instead to reinvent it in a form it believes will restore US geostrategic and economic ascendancy.

Rewriting the rulebook

In December 2025, the newly-arrived US Ambassador to the WTO warned its General Council:

If the WTO does not reform by making tangible improvements in those areas that are central to its mission, it will continue its path toward irrelevancy.

“Reform” in this context means abandoning the cornerstone most-favoured-nation rule that requires all WTO members to be treated equally well, which is the bedrock of multilateralism.

The US wants to reinterpret the WTO’s “security exceptions” (which apply to arms trade, war and United Nations obligations to maintain peace and security) to allow countries absolute sovereignty to decide when the exception applies – effectively neutralising the rules at will.

The WTO would also cease to address issues of “oversupply” and “overcapacity”, “economic security” and “supply chain resilience”, which the US believes have enabled China’s growing economic dominance, leaving the way open for unilateral action outside the WTO.

In the stripped-down WTO, decision-making by consensus would be abandoned and multilateral negotiations replaced by deals that are driven by more powerful players on cherry-picked topics.

Unilateral action is not an idle threat. Trump has imposed arbitrary and erratic tariffs on more than 90 countries for a variety of “national and economic security” reasons, demanding concessions for reducing (not removing) them.

Those demands extend way beyond matters of trade, and impinge deeply on those countries’ own sovereignty. There is nothing the WTO can do.

Weaponising tariffs is also not a new strategy. President Joe Biden maintained the tariffs imposed on China during the first Trump presidency, triggering WTO disputes which remain unresolved.

But Trump’s embrace of raw coercive power strips away any chimera of commitment to multilateralism and the model that has prevailed since the 1980s, or to the development of Third World countries that have been rule-takers in that regime.

Where now for the WTO?

Some more powerful countries have bargained with Trump to reduce the new tariffs. China’s retaliation generated an uneasy one-year truce. Brazil held firm against Trump’s politically-motivated tariffs at considerable economic cost. Australia made a side-deal on critical minerals.

The European Union remains in a standoff over pharmaceutical patents and regulating big tech. India has diversified to survive relatively unscathed, ironically forging closer ties with China.

Less powerful countries are much more vulnerable. Among other obligations, the full texts of “reciprocal trade agreements” with Malaysia and Cambodia, signed in October, require them to:

• replicate US foreign policy and sanctions on other countries

• consult the US before negotiating a new free trade agreement with a country that “jeopardises US essential security interests”

• promise to make potentially crippling investments in and purchases from the US

• involve the US in regulating inward investment and development of Malaysia’s rare earth elements and critical minerals (Malaysia has large unmined repositories, an alternative to China)

• and not tax US tech giants, regulate their monopolies or restrict data flows.

If implemented, these agreements risk creating economic, fiscal, social and political chaos in targeted countries, disrupting their deeply integrated supply chains, and requiring they make impossible choices between the US and China.

In return, the 2025 tariffs will be reduced, not reversed, and the US can terminate the deals pretty much at will.

This poses an existential question for WTO members, including New Zealand and Australia, at the 14th ministerial conference in Cameroon in late March: will members submit to US demands in an attempt to keep the WTO on life support?

Or can they use this interregnum to explore alternatives to the hyper-globalisation model whose era has passed?

Jane Kelsey is affiliated with a number of international NGOs that monitor and advise on developments in international trade law and the WTO.

– ref. The World Trade Organization is on life support. Will Trump’s new rules finish it off? – https://theconversation.com/the-world-trade-organization-is-on-life-support-will-trumps-new-rules-finish-it-off-273216

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Shukriya Bradost, Ph.D. Researcher, International Security and Foreign Policy, Virginia Tech

When Iran’s ongoing protests began in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar on Dec. 28 2025, the government initially treated them as manageable and temporary.

Bazaar merchants have historically been among the most conservative social groups in Iran, deeply embedded in the state’s economic structure and closely connected to political authority. Within the Iranian government itself, there was apparent confidence that their protests were not revolutionary in nature but transactional – a short-lived pressure campaign aimed at stabilizing the collapsing currency and curbing inflation that directly threatened merchants’ livelihoods.

This perception led to an unprecedented development. In his first public response, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei openly acknowledged the merchants’ protests – the first time he had ever accepted the legitimacy of any demonstration.

He characterized them as part of the traditional alliance between the state and the bazaar, indicating that the government still viewed the unrest as controllable.

But authorities did not anticipate what happened next: The protests spread to over 25 provinces and developed into a nationwide challenge to the government’s survival, met by a violent crackdown in which more than 6,000 protesters have reportedly been killed.

As an expert on Iran’s ethnic groups, I have watched as the unrest has expanded to include minority groups – despite skepticism among these communities over the possible outcome of the unrest and concerns over the plans of some central opposition figures.

As reports emerge of government forces killing thousands, the central question has now shifted from whether the state can suppress the protests to how different regions of Iran interpreted the concept of change – whether it is something achievable within the government or necessitates regime change itself.

Ethnic minorities join the protest

Iran is a country of about 93 million people whose modern state was built around a centralized national identity rather than ethnic pluralism.

But that masks a large and politically significant ethnic minority population. While 51% form the Persian majority, 24% of the country identify as Azeri. Kurds number some 7 million to 15 million, composing roughly 8% to 17% of the total population. And Arabs and Baluch minorities represent 3% and 2% of the population, respectively.

Since the Pahlavi monarchy’s nation-building project began in 1925, successive governments, both monarchical and then the Islamic Republic, have treated ethnic diversity as a security challenge and repeatedly suppressed demands for political inclusion, language rights and local governance.

The role of Iran’s ethnic minority groups in the current protests has evolved. Initially, minority regions were less prominent than in the last serious wave of protests: the 2022–23 “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising sparked by the death of a Kurdish-Iranian woman named Jina Mahsa Amini.

The Kurdish involvement in the current protests began in the small city of Malekshahi in Ilam province on Jan. 3. A subsequent violent raid by security forces on wounded protesters inside Ilam hospital provoked outrage beyond the local community and attracted international attention.

Protests continued in Ilam, while in nearby Kermanshah province, particularly the impoverished area of Daradrezh, they erupted over economic deprivation and political discrimination.

A strategic approach to protest

Shiite Kurdish communities in Ilam and Kermanshah continue to experience exclusion rooted in their Kurdish identity. That’s despite sharing a Shiite identity with Iran’s ruling establishment in Tehran – a factor that has historically afforded greater access to government than for the Sunni Kurdish population.

Following the killing of protesters in Ilam and Kermanshah, Kurdish political parties issued a joint statement calling for a region-wide strike.

Notably, Kurdish leaders did not call for protests but for strikes alone. During the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising, the government treated Kurdish cities as security zones – framing the protests as a threat to Iran’s territorial integrity and using that justification to carry out mass killings and executions.

By opting for strikes this time, Kurdish leaders sought to demonstrate solidarity while reducing the risk of large-scale violence and another massacre.

The result was decisive: Nearly all Kurdish cities shut down.

Baluchestan, in Iran’s southeast, followed Kurdistan a day after. Beginning with Friday prayers on Jan. 9, protests erupted, also driven by long-standing ethnic and religious marginalization there.

Iranian Azerbaijan, an area in the country’s northwest, joined later and more cautiously. This delayed, small protest reflects Azerbaijanis’ current favorable position within Iran’s political, military and economic institutions.

Historically, from the 16th century to 1925, Shiite Azari-Turks dominated the Iranian state, with Azerbaijani functioning as a court language.

The Pahlavi monarchy marked a rupture, banning the Azerbaijani language and curtailing local autonomy. But since 1979, the Islamic Republic has partially restored Azerbaijani influence, allowing clerics to address constituents in their native language and reintegrating Azerbaijan into central government in Tehran. The current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is of Azerbaijani descent.

A history of repression

Ethnically based political movements emerged across Iran immediately after the 1979 revolution, which many minority groups had supported in hopes of greater inclusion and rights.

But these movements were quickly suppressed as the Islamic Republic crushed uprisings across Iranian Azerbaijan, Baluchestan, Khuzestan and other peripheral regions.

Kurdistan was the exception, where resistance, military confrontation and state violence, including massacres, continued for several years.

This repression and the impact of the Iran–Iraq War, during which wartime mobilization overshadowed internal grievances, muted ethnic minority demands throughout the 1980s.

But these demands resurfaced in the 1990s, especially sparked by a sense of cultural revival and cross-border identity formation after the Soviet Union’s collapse. In Iranian Kurdistan, a large part of the armed struggle was transformed into a civil struggle, while Peshmerga forces maintained arms and military training across the border in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

The Iranian government has increasingly viewed this awakening as a strategic threat and has responded by decentralizing security and military authority to enable rapid crackdowns on protests without awaiting approval from Tehran.

Diverging protest demands

This history of repression explains why the protests in Iran now were at least initially more centralized than previous uprisings. Ethnic minority regions are not indifferent to change; they are skeptical of its outcome.

Many Persian-majority urban protesters seek social freedoms, economic recovery and normalization with the West, particularly the United States. But ethnic communities carry additional demands: decentralization of power, recognition of linguistic and cultural rights, and genuine power-sharing within the state.

For over four decades, ethnic minority demands have been labeled as separatist or “terrorist” and met with arrests and executions by the Islamic Republic.

This rhetoric has also influenced major Persian-dominated opposition groups – spanning the ideological spectrum from left to right and operating largely in exile – that perceive ethnic minority demands as a threat to Iran’s territorial integrity.

Fears of the shah’s return

Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last shah of Iran, is positioning himself as the leader of the opposition and a transitional figure. But ethnic communities have reason for concern.

Pahlavi’s office has published a road map for a transitional government that sharply contrasts with his public claims of not seeking to monopolize power. The document envisions Pahlavi as a leader with extraordinary authority. In practice, the concentration of power he proposes under his leadership closely resembles the authority currently exercised by Iran’s supreme leader.

For ethnic communities, these implications are particularly troubling. The road map characterizes ethnic-based demands and parties as threats to national security, reinforcing long-standing state narratives rather than departing from them. This explicit stance has deepened skepticism in peripheral regions.

In contrast to Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, whose revolutionary vision was deliberately vague regarding the future status of ethnic groups, the current opposition leadership project articulates a centralized political order that excludes ethnic inclusion and power-sharing.

For communities whose languages were banned and whose regions were systematically underdeveloped during the Pahlavi monarchy, the resurgence of monarchist slogans in central cities only reinforces fears that any transition driven by centralized narratives will again marginalize Iran’s peripheral regions.

The risk of ignoring provinces

Iran’s protests, therefore, reveal more than resistance to authoritarian rule. They expose a fundamental divide over what political change means – and for whom.

In a country as ethnically diverse as Iran, where millions belong to non-Persian ethnic communities, a durable political order cannot, I believe, be built on centralized power dominated by a single ethnic identity.

Any future transition, whether through reform within the current system or through regime change, will have a better chance of success if it incorporates a political framework that acknowledges and incorporates the demands of all regions and communities. Without such inclusion, trust in the process of change will remain elusive – and hopes for a better future dimmed.

Shukriya Bradost is affiliated with the Middle East Institute.

– ref. Iran’s protests have spread across provinces, despite skepticism and concern among ethnic groups – https://theconversation.com/irans-protests-have-spread-across-provinces-despite-skepticism-and-concern-among-ethnic-groups-273276